Posted by: Rachael King on September 13, 2011
On Wednesday, Eva Sasson and Justin Mardjuki will present their mobile app at the DEMO conference in Silicon Valley. Unlike most of the other entrepreneurs pitching products at the conference, Sasson, 19, and Mardjuki, 18, are full-time college students. The pair started TappMob this summer while on break from school. They're one of the ten presentation slots that DEMO is giving to college students during the conference, which began on September 12.
TappMob's mobile app lets people check in at a location and notify just one person or small groups of people with a single touch of a button as opposed to publicly checking in on a service such as Foursquare. They developed the application for young people like them whose parents asked them to check in when driving. "Everytime I would drive somewhere my mom would be calling to check in but I couldn't pick up the phone to talk while I was driving," says Sasson, co-founder and CEO of the company. Now, with a touch of a button, she can send her mother her location on a map to let her know where she is.
The app started out as a summertime project but developed quickly into a full-blown company. Sasson and Mardjuki have received seed funding from Accretive, a private investment firm based in New York City. The amount wasn't disclosed. On September 11, TappMob submitted its first app to the Apple App Store. The company is now developing three more mobile apps based on the idea of one-touch simplicity.
TappMob will be comprised completely of college students. Sasson is studying at Columbia University and Mardjuki is an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. They met in eighth grade, while taking the Spanish placement test for The College Preparatory School in Oakland, California. Sasson lent Mardjuki a pencil for the exam.
The pair is part of a new wave of entrepreneurs under the age of 20. In May, Peter Thiel announced the members of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowships, giving young people a two-year stint and $100,000 grant to turn their ideas into companies. A number of those fellowship winners dropped out of college to accept the fellowship.
Sasson and Mardjuki did not receive grants from Peter Thiel and they plan to stay in school. Says Sasson, "We're not going to drop out, our education comes first."
Posted by: Rachael King on April 7, 2011
In the wake of a natural disaster, aid often comes in the form of food, water and medical supplies. Several universities are offering Japan another form of assistance that will help in the effort to rebuild: supercomputing capacity.
High-powered computers let researchers create simulations that can reveal important clues as to what may happen next, including where more earthquakes are likely to happen or the potential environmental impact of radiation in the air and water that was released from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant. The magnitude-7.1 aftershock that struck Japan today at 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, about 215 miles northeast of Tokyo, underscores the need to run these simulations.
The rolling blackouts in Japan after the earthquake have made it difficult for researchers to use their own supercomputers as simulations can take several days to run. "They've got this actual data from the earthquake that they could be putting through models to think about things like aftershocks, tsunamis, as well as some of the climatological impact related to the water or the air," says Tim Carroll, director and global leader for high performance computing at Dell.
After the March 11 earthquake, when Japanese researchers told Dell about the power problems, Dell coordinated with university facilities, including the University of Texas Advanced Computing Center, Florida State, Lawrence Livermore National Labs and Cambridge University to donate capacity.
Currently, the Texas Advanced Computing Center has six researchers from Japan on their high performance computing system. Three of those researchers are from the University of Tokyo Earthquake Research Institute and three are from RIKEN, a large natural sciences research institute in Japan, says Colleen Ryan, a Dell spokesperson.
Those researchers have so far used 117,000 of the 500,000 compute hours donated by the Texas Advanced Computing Center, she says. That is equivalent to 406 days of running data on a single server, but the researchers have done this computation in less than two weeks. "We don't know precisely what they are doing, but the researchers from the University of Tokyo ERI are most likely doing some research around what happened during the initial earthquake, what changed in the earth's structure and what might happen in the future," she says.
Supercomputers are often used for complex calculations such as climate modeling or to simulate nuclear reactions. After the initial 9.0 earthquake in Japan on March 11, Dell computers running at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab calculated where the tsunami waves actually hit.
"It correctly calculated wave height and distance of where those waves would actually hit, but it took roughly 12 hours to do the total computation, which means they got the answer right, but if we'd been able to do the computation faster it might have been useful to the people on the ground," says Dell's Carroll. The tsunami waves hit Japan's coast within minutes after the earthquake.
Other areas where researchers might use high-performance computing power is for seismic analysis of nuclear reactors and other buildings, as well as how long it may take for radiation to dissipate from sea water, ground water and the atmosphere, says Dell's Carroll.
On April 6, fisherman in Ibaraki prefecture, Japan's fifth-largest seafood producer, stopped operations after tainted fish were found south of the location where radioactive water from a nuclear reactor at Fukushima Dai-Ichi contaminated the sea, reported Bloomberg News.
Researchers will likely run data from today's earthquake. Says Carroll, "Each time they get real data from actual quakes, it makes the predictions better and better."
Posted by: Rachael King on March 7, 2011
Apple's iPad is making its way into some cockpits. The device won approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to display navigational charts for some charter pilots, according to a story published today by my Bloomberg colleague Sonja Elmquist. The decision covers iPads used by Executive Jet Management, a unit of Warren Buffett's NetJets, and it paves the way for pilots at other airlines to seek authorization to use the device, reports Elmquist.
From aviation to the government, Apple's tablet is finding a home with workers in many different sectors. Financial services, technology and the healthcare industies are seeing the greatest adoption of the iPad for business use, according to a November 2010 report from mobile enterprise vendor Good Technology.
The report found that 36.8 percent of Good's iPad activations among 4,000 enterprise customers had come from financial services, 11.4 percent from high tech, and 10.5 percent in healthcare.
The government accounted for 10.5 percent of iPad activations by November 2010. Use in the government continues to grow. Data collectors for the United States Department of Agriculture now carry iPads when conducting surveys in the field.
Posted by: Rachael King on October 11, 2010
The machines that handle the world's computing tasks are also some of the planet's biggest polluters. Data centers, PCs, mobile phones and gaming consoles use electricity that frequently comes from coal-burning power plants or other sources of energy that give off high carbon emissions.
The information and communication technology (ICT) industry in the U.S. is on track to quadruple its consumption of electricity between 2009 and 2020, according to a study released today from the Institute for Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics (ISAID) in Singapore and Rice University in Houston, Texas. Unless electronics can be altered to become significantly more energy-efficient, the related carbon emissions from these products are set to grow as well, says the report. In the U.S. carbon emissions related to tech products will grow from 72.95 megatons of carbon dioxide released in 2009 to 195.06 megatons released in 2020.
About 6 percent of the world's electricity consumption goes to power cell phones, computers, data centers and other information and communication technology, according to a March 2010 report from market research firm SBI Energy. That electricity accounts for about 2 percent of the world's global carbon emissions.
"The issue of power will be prevalent everywhere," says Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM.
IBM is among companies already trying to reduce energy consumption. Supercomputers, for example, are some of the biggest energy consumers in tech and research facilities can spend millions per year in energy bills to run these machines. When the Green500 List was released in July, IBM had 17 of the top 20 most energy-efficient supercomputers. IBM supercomputers averaged 201 million calculations per second per watt while other supercomputers averaged 102 million calculations per second per watt, according to Green500.org.
Ambitious as the efforts of IBM and other companies may be, they may not be enough to keep the IT industry from making an outsized contribution to carbon emissions. If the U.S. continues on this same path, global carbon emissions related to PCs and laptops, which accounted for 48.5 percent of all global ICT emissions in 2009 will nearly quadruple by 2020. Data center emissions will more than triple by 2020, according to today's report.
Do you have any ideas for making tech products more sustainable? I'd love to hear them.
Posted by: Rachael King on June 15, 2010
Cyber attacks are now so common that corporate directors must assume that their companies' intellectual property will be stolen, according to experts at today's Bloomberg Link Boards & Risk Conference in Washington. "Boards can't keep hoping they won't be attacked because they will be," said Val Rahmani, chief executive of Atlanta-based security-consulting firm Damballa, Inc. My colleagues Peter Elstrom and Rochelle Garner wrote about corporate boards and cyber attacks in a story published today by Bloomberg News.
Security experts such as Patrick Morley, CEO of enterprise security firm Bit9 say that attacks are on the rise. Morley came to visit me last week in San Francisco after giving an educational seminar about how to stop malware. He predicts that security will move toward so-called white listing, the practice of defining the software that IT departments will let run on computers and mobile devices. Bit9 has created a global registry of known "good software" and offers a product that acts as a sentry, only letting employees download applications that aren't dangerous.
This works in reverse of the way many anti-virus software programs work. Those programs scan for code that's known to be bad. The problem, says Morley, is that at this point there are more bad viruses than there are safe software applications on the market.
"We're all looking for bad but we know what good is," said Cisco's chief security officer John Stewart, when I interviewed him in March. Software vendors all know what they publish and the idea is to create a comprehensive list of that software so that everything else is questioned. "I think it's high time that we continue to look for things that are potentially more effective," said Stewart.
